Discovering the Power of People’s History – and Why it is Feared
Today

By John Pilger

November 28, 2013 "Information
Clearing House - England is two countries.
One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow.
When I first arrived from Australia, it seemed no one went north
of Watford and those who had emigrated from the north worked
hard to change their accents and obscure their origins and learn
the mannerisms and codes of the southern comfortable classes.
Some would mock the life they had left behind. They were
changing classes, or so they thought.

When the
Daily Mirror sent me to report from the north in the 1960s, my
colleagues in London had fun with my naïve antipodean banishment
to their equivalent of Siberia. True, it was the worst winter
for 200 years and I had never worn a scarf or owned a coat. Try
to imagine what it is like in darkest Leeds and Hull, they
warned.

This was a
time when working people in England were said to be "speaking
out", even "taking over". Realist films were being made, and
accents that had not been welcome in the broadcast media and
sections of the entertainment business were now apparently in
demand, though often as caricatures.

During
that first drive north, when I stopped for petrol, I failed to
understand what the man said; within weeks, what the people were
seemed perfectly clear. They were another nation with a
different history, different loyalties, different humour, even
different values. At the heart of this was the politics of
class. Crossing the Pennines, the Empire dropped away. The
imperial passions of the south barely flickered. On Merseyside
and Tyneside, apart from the usual notables, no one gave a damn
for royalty. There was the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of a
wagons-drawn working class society - unless, as was made
painfully clear in later years, you happened to be black or
brown. That solidarity was, for me, the story, as if it was the
missing chapter in England's political heritage, a people's
history of modern times, suppressed by Thatcher and Blair and
still feared by their echoes.

I had
already glimpsed the power of this solidarity in the place where
my parents had grown up and I knew as a boy: the mining region
of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. Here, whole collieries
had shipped out from Yorkshire, Tyneside and Durham. "Watch
them; they're communists," I heard someone say. They were
fighters for working class decency: proper pay, safety and
solidarity. The Welsh were the same. They brought with them the
pain and suffering and anger of those who had industralised the
world and gained little but the resilient comfort of each
other.

The Mirror
published my reports of working lives: miners working in three
foot shafts, steelworkers in unimaginable heat. I would find a
street, virtually any street, and knock on doors. What intrigued
me then was that such human warmth and forbearance could survive
the treadmill of northern cities. Moreover, the great radical
tradition of resistance in the north - from the cotton workers
of the 19th century to the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-5 -
always threatened the game known in London as "the consensus".

This was
the nod-and-wink arrangement between Labour and Tory governments
and the five per cent who owned half the wealth of all of the
United Kingdom. The Labour MP turned media man, Brian Walden,
described how it worked. "The two front benches [in Parliament]
liked each other and disliked their back benches," he wrote. "We
were children of the famous consensus... turning the opposition
into government made little difference, for we believed much the
same things."

My second
film for television, made for Granada TV in Manchester, was
called 'Conversations
with a Working Man'.. It was the story of Jack Walker, a
dyehouse worker from Keighley in Yorkshire whose job was
monotonous, filthy and injurious to his health, yet he derived a
pride from "doing it well". Jack believed passionately that
working people should stand together. That an articulate trade
unionist was allowed to express his views without intrusion by
those who often claimed to speak for him, and to worry out loud
about the stitched-up democracy in Westminster, was beyond the
pale. The term "working class", I was told, had "political
implications" and would not be acceptable to the Independent
Television Authority. It would have to be changed to "working
heritage". Then there was the problem of the term "the people".
This was a "Marxist expression" and also had to go. And what was
this "consensus"? Surely, Britain had a vibrant two-party
system.

When I
read recently that 600,000 Greater Manchester residents were
"experiencing the effects of extreme poverty" and that 1.6
million were slipping into penury, I was reminded how the
political consensus was unchanged. Now led by the southern
squirearchy of David Cameron, George Osborne and their fellow
Etonians, the only change is the rise of Labour's corporate
management class, exemplified by Ed Miliband's support for
"austerity" - the new jargon for imposed poverty.

In Clara
Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the wintry dark of early
morning, I walked down the hill with people who worked more than
sixty hours a week for a pittance. They described their "gains"
as the Health Service. They had seen only one politician in the
street, a Liberal who came and put up posters and said something
inaudible from his Land Rover and sped away. The Westminster
mantra then was "paying our way as a nation" and "productivity".
Today, their places of work, and their trade union protection,
always tenuous, have gone. "What's wrong," a Clara Street man
told me, "is the thing the politicians don't want to talk about
any more. It's governments not caring how we live, because we're
not part of their country."

This
article was first published in the New Statesman, UK - Follow
John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

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